Class Warfare Poverty Death

Out of the hundred million people living in Soviet Russia, we should be able get 90 million behind us. The others, there’s no talking with them, they have to be annihilated. — Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev, September 1918

Results. Approximately 245 000 deaths in the United States in [the year] 2000 were attributable to low education, 176 000 to racial segregation, 162 000 to low social support, 133 000 to individual-level poverty, 119 000 to income inequality, and 39 000 to area-level poverty. — Sandro Galea, Melissa Tracy, Katherine J. Hoggatt, Charles DiMaggio, and Adam Karpati, “Estimated Deaths Attributable to Social Factors in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health, August 2011

In the course of the Russian Civil War (1918-1922) and subsequently, the Bolshevik leadership sought not only to defeat its opponents’ armies but also to eliminate the propertied classes. Another famous line of the period comes from Lenin. In response to an uprising of wealthy farmers in a given region, he called upon his local allies to hang publicly at least 100 of these “rich bastards and known bloodsuckers. Publish their names. Seize all their grain.”

My goal here is not to revisit the history of the Russian Civil War and of what has come to be called the “Red Terror”—mass killings, torture, and oppression of nominally civilian enemies of the Bolsheviks. Nor will I do more than note that the Red Terror was a moment in a long history of violent class warfare. The American Civil War was another moment, as was the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century in which one-third of the German population was killed. Before Russia, there was, of course, la Terreur of the French Revolution. In twentieth-century Germany, the Nazis were backed by the leading industrialists and bankers, and one of the initial goals (and accomplishments) was to destroy the power of the labor unions and do away with their leaders. There are obvious parallels between the Bolsheviks’ activities and the Nazi Die Endlösung (Final Solution).

The line from Zinoviev brought to my mind another form of deadly class warfare: the exploitation of workers and the maintenance of an underclass, a surplus labor pool, to maintain constant downward pressure on wages. (And despite all the debates about immigration, it seems taboo to talk about the effects of immigration on wages or about how the threat of arrest and deportation are used by employers, at times in collaboration with the police and customs officials, to reduce wages and working conditions to the barest minimum.[1] More in the news is the battle over what the minimum wage should be. Lenin was for seizing the wealthy farmers’ grain; most American corporations, from tiny to huge, and including the major fast-food companies and retailers, have been for keeping the minimum wage as low as possible.)

Poverty is a consequence of subsistence wages, which is what many, many Americans receive. The “Estimated Deaths” researchers and their institution, Columbia University’s school of public health, are to be thanked for their work, but did we really need that study to remind us that poverty leads to premature death and disease? Perhaps we did. The geographer David Harvey has pointed out that “[p]overty is a far more important cause of shortened life expectations in the United States than smoking, but it is smoking that gets all the attention.”[2]

Overall, approximately 2.5 million Americans died in 2000. The Columbia researchers’ article notes that heart disease is commonly considered the leading cause of death in the contemporary United States. However, “the number of deaths we calculated as attributable to low education is comparable to the number caused by acute myocardial infarction” (heart attack).[3]

The global statistics are more blunt. Worldwide, about 21,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, and this notwithstanding that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. As poverty.com puts it:

The problem is that hungry people . . . lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves. Being constantly malnourished, they become weaker and often sick. . . . This downward spiral often continues until death for them and their families.

Among the differences—between, say, the Bolsheviks and the US fast-food companies and other employers—there are these two:

1. The Bolsheviks were seeking to take power and to do away with centuries of oppression. The employers are seeking to maintain power and oppression.

2. The Bolsheviks killed people in cold blood and in bursts (millions in the space of a few years). In the US, the premature deaths and disease do not come in bursts but year after year, a few hundred thousand per year, decade upon decade. And for employers and those involved in the legal regimes and propaganda that support this current system, these premature deaths and diseases of the poor are collateral damage. Were there a way to pay workers subsistence wages and have them, nonetheless, live long and productive lives, the employers would be overjoyed. Their only interest is in keeping the wages as low as possible (and in blocking occupational safety regulations, etc.). And, in any case, the poor don’t tend to die while cutting up, deep-frying, or stocking chicken—at their old jobs. They die in apartments and hospitals and, increasingly, on the street.[4]

Of course, even the wealthy people targeted by the Bolsheviks were going to die eventually, and a certain amount of poverty cannot be addressed by laws, government policies, and culture (by changing attitudes, points of view). But let us suppose that 50 percent of the people who die of poverty every year could live another ten years were food, water, and income distributed less unequally. This may help us appreciate what a devastating class war is going on year after year in the United States and throughout the world.

Oxfam has estimated that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty—that’s less than one-quarter of the annual income of the world’s 100 richest billionaires.[5]

— Wm. Eaton

Credits & References

The photographs were taken by Nick Hedges for Shelter, a housing and homelessness charity in Scotland. In 1968, Shelter hired Nick Hedges to document the living conditions being experienced in poor-quality housing in the United Kingdom. For more, see Nick Hedges’ photographs for Shelter 1969-72. One of Hedges’s comments: “The thing about people living in slum housing is that there is no drama. . . . It’s about the absolute wearing down of people’s morale in a quiet and undemonstrative way.”

My version of Zinoviev’s line is a translation from a French translation. The standard English translation is (and with a prior sentence added): “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”

In the current, December 17, 2015, issue of the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman has a very good piece— Challenging the Oligarchy—about “the quiet class war that America’s oligarchy has been waging for decades.” I may write more about this in Zeteo next week. At least the phrase “class war” has finally made it out of the closet!

Endnotes

[1] One revealing example is given in The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent (New York Review of Books, July 9, 2015), wherein Andrew Hacker touches on the tremendous use Microsoft and other high-tech companies make of vulnerable, low-paid immigrant tech workers who are paid about half what tech workers with American citizenship would, otherwise, be able to earn.

See also a 1976 US Supreme Court decision: “[A]cceptance by illegal aliens of jobs on substandard terms as to wages and working conditions can seriously depress wage scales and working conditions of citizens and legally admitted aliens; and employment of illegal aliens under such conditions can diminish the effectiveness of labor unions.” De Canas v. Bica, 424 U.S. 351, 356-57 (1976). As quoted in ICED OUT: How Immigration Enforcement Has Interfered with Workers’ Rights, by Rebecca Smith, National Employment Law Project; Ana Avendaño, AFL-CIO; and Julie Martínez Ortega, American Rights at Work Education Fund.

[3] Dr. Galea, now Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, has informed me that there is overlap in these statistics. For example, the same person may have been counted as having died due to both racial segregation and area-level poverty. So one cannot add up all these figures and end up with a cumulative death toll. Similarly, among those dying of heart attacks or smoking (pulmonary diseases), many may also have little education or social support.

[4] Approximately 1 percent of New York City’s population is now homeless. This is three times as many people as were homeless fifteen years ago.

[5]Technical note, let’s call it. As an advanced-degreed professional in New York City, I have earned rather more than the average global citizen. In the early nineteenth century one of my ancestors proved to be a quite savvy, and likely also quite aggressive, real-estate speculator, and I have inherited a little money from him. Supposing that not just the United States but the world as a whole returned to the situation prevailing in the US in the 1950s, the situation in which, it is said, CEOs earned “only” ten times more than the lowest-paid workers in their organizations. That is, supposing that my annual earnings were taxed or otherwise channeled so that they were not more than ten times the amount earned by the world’s lowest-paid workers (and rentiers—people living off their investments). My income would be reduced, and likely significantly, and likely even if the new system factored in the differential costs of living (e.g. in New York City, where I live, as compared to other, perhaps less costly areas). Whether my “standard of living” would, as a result, go down is a rather more open question than might be realized. (A “meal should taste better if one eats it with the knowledge that other people are not starving to death.” — On Savoring.)

Nonetheless, I must note this one aspect of the income-inequality discussions in the Western media: the super-rich are being attacked by people, like me, who are, from a global perspective, ourselves quite rich. A skeptic might say that nothing needs correcting so much as other people’s morals, and that our position is that no one should be very much richer than we are. A student of class warfare might say that our position is that the professional classes (teachers, writers, artists, etc., most definitely included) should have more power and the business classes less. Another might say that we are not seeking equality, but rather moderation, a reduction in inequality. My answer for the moment is “all of the above.”

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